Some hitherto unknown facts about the private career of Henry Oldenburg

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Abstract
The main outlines of Henry Oldenburg’s public career have long been known: ample evidence of bis activity as working secretary of the Royal Society from early in its history until his death in 1677 is furnished by Birch’s History of the Royal Society , by the very existence of the early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions , and by the archives of the Society. As we hope to show by editing Oldenburg’s correspondence in extenso , his exchange of letters with hundreds of learned men provides a valuable source for an understanding of the way in which scientific enterprise was conducted in the seventeenth century as well as for the understanding of many obscure points of the development of scientific thought. The correspondence also provides materials relating to Oldenburg’s own career. In spite of the detailed account in the Dictionary of National Biography , which made use of material collected from the Bremen Archives for information touching his ancestry, education and diplomatic career, Oldenburg’s private life has remained remarkably enigmatic. For example the exact date of his birth is unknown, his activities between the end of his formal education (1639) and his appearance as a diplomat in England (1653) hitherto untraced, his first wife’s name apparently unrecorded, and his means of livelihood mysterious. In the course of preparing for the press the first volume of our projected edition (to the end of 1662) we have found clues to illuminate the first two problems; work on the next two volumes (1663-5, and 1666-7, respectively) has illuminated the two latter problems.

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